Labs

With delivery factored in, the Gladiator is the cheapest PC here, yet that isn't reflected in its specification. Its mirror-finish Antec P182 SE case instantly catches the eye and, although it's a bit of a fingerprint magnet, it will look great on your desk.

Like the Chillblast's Lian Li chassis, this case is divided into separate compartments, with the 850W PSU at the bottom and removable caddies for the hard disks. Despite several case fans, its 39dBA idle noise level is around average this month, and this is with an overclocked CPU as well.

Its Core

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2 Quad Q6600 CPU is ramped up to 3.2GHz, allowing the Gladiator to slay the majority with a benchmark score of 1.94. The trade-off for the low price is the single 8800 GTX graphics card, although it's still perfectly capable of gaming at high resolutions. The 24in BenQ TFT is one of the best here, with accurate colours, a hugely adjustable stand and all the inputs you could possibly need, including HDMI.

Gladiator has aimed the Trident directly at gamers by including a Logitech G15 keyboard and a superb MX Revolution mouse, as well as a steel mouse pad - a rarity these days. There are also 5.1 Logitech speakers, two DVD writers, and the enthusiast X38-chipset motherboard has oodles of expansion potential should you wish to add a second graphics card in the future.

The one-year on-site warranty is disappointing, as is the 640GB of storage, although in any other group test we'd feel ridiculous saying that. But for just £1,701, the value this represents is phenomenal. If you want Blu-ray drives and hard disk arrays you'll need to pay more, but the Gladiator gives everything most users will ever need at a highly affordable price.